The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of
transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of
personal information. As prep reading, viewing, and listening, here are a few timely links on the topics of transparency and privacy on the web:

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every
interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a
personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read,
documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of
your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions
between you and your favorite apps over time.

The value of mobile camera phones as a means to capture events in one’s
life will only be further enhanced as these devices become more
powerful, their cameras improve, their capabilities increase, and the
speed of connectivity continues to grow. There will be an opportunity
to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale
but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of
people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a
'Big Brother' way.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period
on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that
urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click,
the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There
are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the
last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett
county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow
that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in
Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and
loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a
reporter read part of the list to her.